Well, turns out the book from 1937, Hart Crane, The Life of an American Poet by Philip Horton, was a regular page-turner. I read it in four days and loved how Horton gave Crane's life-events an evenly-spread psychological context, something I'm missing from the more recent poet biographies (Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford, for example). Which reminds me, Edna was only given a throw-off mention in Crane's biography (on one page as "that girl poet") when in fact she was in her prime contemporaneous with Crane in New York City, although she swam in different circles.
Otherwise the biography was pretty open about Crane's life, including his sexuality (although the author treated it, albeit sympathetically, as a mental disorder). Much theory was made over Crane's dramatic childhood and his relationship to his work. Horton provided a very strong defense of the more difficult aspects of Crane's poetry, aligning him more with T. S. Eliot in spirit and technique, as opposed to the other famous writers of the Lost Generation, his contributions including:
- his revival of Elizabethan blank verse
- his use of unusual words
- his incorporation of complex machinery and mechanical activities of his time, the industrial age, (the spiritual values of airplanes, subways and skyscrapers), and understanding these developments as both oppressive and corrupting versus freeing and enlightening.
Interestingly, Hart Crane wrote a poem to Emily Dickinson and among his more popular poems were excerpts from his opus "The Bridge" (compared by Horton to T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" as a great epic about America) and his Voyages poems. In Hart Crane's life, he only published two books White Buildings (1926) and The Bridge (1930) before he committed suicide in 1932 by jumping off a steamship sailing from Mexico to New York. His body was never found.
Craft talk in the book
Quote from his letters:
"I can say that the problem of form becomes harder and harder for me every day. I am not at all satisfied with anything I have thus far done, mere shadowings, and too slight to satisfy me. I have never, so far, been able to present a vital, living, tangible–a positive emotion to my satisfaction. For as soon as I attempt such an act I either grow obvious or ordinary, and abandon the thing at the second line. Oh! it is hard. One must be drenched in words, literally soaked with them to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment."
"Let us invent an idiom for the proper transportation of jazz into words! Something clean, sparkling, elusive!"
"One works and works over it to finish and organize it perfectly–but fundamentally that doesn't affect one's way of saying it."
Horton discussing the poem "Faustus and Helen:"
"Technically, it showed important extensions of craftsmanship: the long rhythmical lines approximating the pentameter without, however, committing themselves to any distinct pattern; the enrichment of language and music fused by syntax and assonance into an idiom unmistakably his own–these things brought him a sense of power and confidence….a milestone for him, making the step from minor to major intention. It's subject matter indicated an expansion of consciousness, a shift of interest from the particular to the universal. He had achieved at least a partial realization of his long-standing desire to write of the 'eternal verities'…to ally his work firmly with tradition and still to express fully the spirit of his own times."
Horton talking about Crane's circle of literary friends:
"For almost a year the four met [Hart Crane, Gorham Munson, Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank] frequently, tacitly recognizing a kind of spiritual brotherhood that bound them together in a unit distinct from other factions of the artistic world. Their catch words were 'the new slope of consciousness,' the superior logic of metaphor,' 'noumenal knowledge,' the interior rapports' of unanimisme, the doctrine of Jules Romains."
Horton talking about Crane's use of words:
"His attitude towards language was much like that of a painter to his pigments. He gloried in words aside from their meaning as things in themselves, prizing their weight, density, color, and sound; and gloated over the subtle multiplicity of their associations."
"Crane appears to have built up his poems in blocks of language which were cemented into coherent aesthetic form by the ductile stuff of complex associations, metaphors, sound, color, and so forth. This would account for the juggling about of lines from one context to another with what seems to have been a kind of creative opportunism. Actually he was doing no more than the painter or sculptor who strives for what has been called 'significant form.' His enthusiastic study of modern painting was having its own influence…he considered [his poems] not as vehicles of thought so much as bodies of the impalpable substance of language to be molded into aesthetically self-sufficient and complete units….Crane intended these poems not as descriptions of experience that could be read about, but as immediate experiences that the reader could have…The reader was not necessarily expected to derive any more rational meaning from these poems that from those state of consciousness, experienced by everyone at the same time, which forever elude the conclusive grasp of reasonable understanding and expression."
For Horton, this is why Crane can be classified as a mystical poet, for his search of the elusive consciousness.
Speaking of mystic poets and that which "forever elude the conclusive grasp of reasonable understanding and expression," I went to my local Santa Fe performance space last night to see the documentary Rumi, Returning. It was an awful mess. A room full of baby boomers grunting over Rumi poetry, so many of them the theater ran out of chairs and one elderly lady tried to sit on my lap (not kidding). The film was convoluted, pompous and looked like something shot in the 1980s, complete with bad sound, camera jumps and travel footage of Turkey overused in all the wrong places.
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